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Monday, June 28, 2004

Beenie Man & principles

I'm still a bit put out that I cannot listen to Beenie Man any more. Over the weekend the Guardian published an article describing the only violent homophobic culture of Jamaica, listing him amongst the artists who actively encourage it through their music. Now at least in Eminem the apparently dysfunctional regard for others is laced with irony, but here I'm not so sure and so won't be able to enjoy his superb music again without the thought.

One of the things that might make people so threatened, and so wilfully prejudiced, might well actually be the way the struggle of people who happen to homosexual to achieve normalisation in our society confronts us so-called 'normal' people. As both Rowan Williams (in his fantastic talk, the Body's Grace, unfortunately only up on a silly conservative website) and Marilyn McCord (in a sermon preached before the General Synod debate on Some Issues in Human Sexuality) have pointed out, the process of struggling for acceptance places sexuality right there in the public identity. Those of us who happen to be heterosexual are made to consider sexuality by our relating with people who are still considered by many to be distorted, where we might otherwise be able to sit back in comfortable complacency.

"Battyman, battyman, battyman."

This is not the same as a neurotically mixed up sex-drenched popular culture. With the challenge to acceptance of people who publicly live their full identity as unashamedly gay Christians, for example, many seem to feel deeply threatened. Granted, the results are not as dramatic as those expressions shown in Jamaica. But we see something comparable - what Martin calls "the yuk factor" - which results in a harmful defensiveness, where people who don't fit the given mould are at best ostracised and at worst denounced on Newsnight as perverted human beings. Even in our supposedly relatively accepting west, even in the community that lives the body of Christ in that western part of the world, it'll probably take a long time to come to terms with ourselves and others.